It is not often that a single individual is largely responsible for creating an entire political movement. But John Tanton can claim without exaggeration that he is the founding father of America's modern anti-immigration movement.

In addition to directly controlling four prominent immigration restriction groups, Tanton has been critical in establishing or helping fund several other anti-immigration groups.

He serves on the board of the group with the largest membership, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), which he founded 23 years ago.

Tanton had something akin to a conversion when he came across The Camp of the Saints, a lurid, racist novel written by Frenchman Jean Raspail that depicts an invasion of the white, Western world by a fleet of starving, dark-skinned refugees.

Tanton helped get the novel published in English and soon was promoting what he considered the book's prophetic argument.

"Their [Third World] 'huddled masses' cast longing eyes on the apparent riches of the industrial west," Tanton wrote in 1975. "The developed countries lie directly in the path of a great storm."

And so he began to develop a counter-force. After 1979, when he co-founded FAIR, Tanton launched "a whole array of organizations that serve the overall ideological and political battle plan to halt immigration "” even if those groups have somewhat differing politics," explained Rick Swartz, the pro-immigration activist who founded the National Immigration Forum in 1982.

"Tanton is the puppeteer behind this entire movement," Swartz said. "He is the organizer of a significant amount of its financing, and is both the major recruiter of key personnel and the intellectual leader of the whole network of groups."

Tanton declined to be interviewed for this story.

The Wise Men's Mistake

More damaging, however, was the leak, shortly before a 1988 English Only referendum in Arizona, of the so-called WITAN memos written by Tanton and the then-executive director of FAIR, Roger Conner. (WITAN was short for the Old English term "witenangemot," meaning "council of wise men." The memos were meant for Tanton colleagues who met at retreats to discuss immigration.)

The memos were replete with derogatory references to Latinos, reflecting a kind of entrenched bigotry that had only been suspected before. They complained mightily of the high Hispanic birth rate suggesting that Latin American immigrants would bring political corruption to the United States.

The memos included a demographic punchline that depicted Hispanics as hyperactive breeders and revolted many readers: "[P]erhaps this is the first instance in which those with their pants up are going to get caught by those with their pants down."

Linda Chavez, executive director of Tanton creation U.S. English and later a prominent Republican conservative columnist, quit over what she saw as Tanton's bigoted, anti-Latino bias.

So did several well-known U.S. English board members, including advisory board member Walter Cronkite, who called the memos "embarrassing."

Eventually Tanton left, although he complained he was being smeared as a racist, and went on to form a replacement organization "” English Language Advocates, later renamed Pro English.

More to the point, perhaps, the WITAN memos spelled out the strategy that Tanton would continue to follow for years. "We have spent some time, money and effort trying to build a membership for purposes of political validity and power," one memo said, "but this has not been a major emphasis."

The memos candidly added what anti-immigration groups would not admit publicly "” that the "movement" was "heavily based on a small number of donors."

Joining the Extremists

Since 1998, the links have been strengthened between key anti-immigration activists and groups and white supremacist organizations – in particular, the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC) and American Renaissance (also known by the name of its parent, the New Century Foundation).

That year, Coe, Spencer and Rick Oltman, FAIR's western regional representative, all came to Cullman, Ala., for a CCC-organized protest against a swelling local population of Mexican workers.

After the protest, Vinson, the leader of the American Immigration Control Foundation, began writing of the perils of immigration for the CCC's paper, the Citizens Informer. Spencer started selling his anti-immigrant videotape in the same tabloid.

In 1999, the CCC hosted a panel on immigration that featured four key anti-immigrant activists "” Vinson, Spencer, Population-Environment Balance's Virginia Abernethy and Wayne Lutton, who had begun to edit The Social Contract, a Tanton publication, just a year earlier.

More recently, Lutton joined the editorial board of the Citizens Informer "” and also became a trustee of the racist New Century Foundation, parent of American Renaissance magazine.

Barbara Coe of California Coalition for Immigration Reform has spoken at three recent CCC conferences and writes regularly for the Informer.

Brent Nelson, who is on the board of Vinson's AICF, began serving as president of the CCC's Conservative Citizens Foundation and as an adviser to the Informer.

Asked by the Intelligence Report about Lutton "” who works out of Tanton's Petoskey, Mich., offices "” and other anti-immigration activists who have climbed on board with hate groups, Tanton declined to answer that or a series of other questions faxed to him by the Report at his request.

The questions showed "little evidence of tolerance for differences of opinion," he wrote.

Last year, Virginia Abernethy, a professor emeritus at Vanderbilt's medical school and leader of the Tanton-influenced Population-Environment Balance, became the latest in the Tanton network to join the Citizens Informer editorial board.

"My view of the Council of Conservative Citizens," she told the Intelligence Report, "is that they support traditional values and the freedom of people to associate with people that they want to associate with."

She spoke on the same day that the CCC's website carried a comparison of black pop singer Michael Jackson and an ape "” a comparison that Abernethy suggested may have reflected "bad taste," but not racism.

"What is the point of a society that pushes [racial] mixing?" she asked when told of another CCC web item that derided the wife of murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl as a "mixed race" woman who is "committed to racial and ethnic amalgamation."

"Our society pushes mixing," the retired Vanderbilt professor added. "I think this is probably not a good thing for the society."

Opinion polls consistently show that a majority of Americans believe that immigration needs to be cut below current levels, although that does not imply that they support the ideas of white supremacists or other bigots.

Certainly, the lobbyists who visited in February were taken seriously by many of those they visited "” today, the web page of Tancredo's Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus carries links to the pages of a whole array of Tanton-associated groups.

The danger is not that immigration levels are debated by Americans, but that the debate is controlled by bigots and extremists whose views are anathema to the ideals on which this country was founded.

It is not often that a single individual is largely responsible for creating an entire political movement. But John Tanton can claim without exaggeration that he is the founding father of America's modern anti-immigration movement.

In addition to directly controlling four prominent immigration restriction groups, Tanton has been critical in establishing or helping fund several other anti-immigration groups.

He serves on the board of the group with the largest membership, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), which he founded 23 years ago.

Tanton had something akin to a conversion when he came across The Camp of the Saints, a lurid, racist novel written by Frenchman Jean Raspail that depicts an invasion of the white, Western world by a fleet of starving, dark-skinned refugees.

Tanton helped get the novel published in English and soon was promoting what he considered the book's prophetic argument.

"Their [Third World] 'huddled masses' cast longing eyes on the apparent riches of the industrial west," Tanton wrote in 1975. "The developed countries lie directly in the path of a great storm."

And so he began to develop a counter-force. After 1979, when he co-founded FAIR, Tanton launched "a whole array of organizations that serve the overall ideological and political battle plan to halt immigration "” even if those groups have somewhat differing politics," explained Rick Swartz, the pro-immigration activist who founded the National Immigration Forum in 1982.

"Tanton is the puppeteer behind this entire movement," Swartz said. "He is the organizer of a significant amount of its financing, and is both the major recruiter of key personnel and the intellectual leader of the whole network of groups."

Tanton declined to be interviewed for this story.

The Wise Men's Mistake

More damaging, however, was the leak, shortly before a 1988 English Only referendum in Arizona, of the so-called WITAN memos written by Tanton and the then-executive director of FAIR, Roger Conner. (WITAN was short for the Old English term "witenangemot," meaning "council of wise men." The memos were meant for Tanton colleagues who met at retreats to discuss immigration.)

The memos were replete with derogatory references to Latinos, reflecting a kind of entrenched bigotry that had only been suspected before. They complained mightily of the high Hispanic birth rate suggesting that Latin American immigrants would bring political corruption to the United States.

The memos included a demographic punchline that depicted Hispanics as hyperactive breeders and revolted many readers: "[P]erhaps this is the first instance in which those with their pants up are going to get caught by those with their pants down."

Linda Chavez, executive director of Tanton creation U.S. English and later a prominent Republican conservative columnist, quit over what she saw as Tanton's bigoted, anti-Latino bias.

So did several well-known U.S. English board members, including advisory board member Walter Cronkite, who called the memos "embarrassing."

Eventually Tanton left, although he complained he was being smeared as a racist, and went on to form a replacement organization "” English Language Advocates, later renamed Pro English.

More to the point, perhaps, the WITAN memos spelled out the strategy that Tanton would continue to follow for years. "We have spent some time, money and effort trying to build a membership for purposes of political validity and power," one memo said, "but this has not been a major emphasis."

The memos candidly added what anti-immigration groups would not admit publicly "” that the "movement" was "heavily based on a small number of donors."

Joining the Extremists

Since 1998, the links have been strengthened between key anti-immigration activists and groups and white supremacist organizations – in particular, the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC) and American Renaissance (also known by the name of its parent, the New Century Foundation).

That year, Coe, Spencer and Rick Oltman, FAIR's western regional representative, all came to Cullman, Ala., for a CCC-organized protest against a swelling local population of Mexican workers.

After the protest, Vinson, the leader of the American Immigration Control Foundation, began writing of the perils of immigration for the CCC's paper, the Citizens Informer. Spencer started selling his anti-immigrant videotape in the same tabloid.

In 1999, the CCC hosted a panel on immigration that featured four key anti-immigrant activists "” Vinson, Spencer, Population-Environment Balance's Virginia Abernethy and Wayne Lutton, who had begun to edit The Social Contract, a Tanton publication, just a year earlier.

More recently, Lutton joined the editorial board of the Citizens Informer "” and also became a trustee of the racist New Century Foundation, parent of American Renaissance magazine.

Barbara Coe of California Coalition for Immigration Reform has spoken at three recent CCC conferences and writes regularly for the Informer.

Brent Nelson, who is on the board of Vinson's AICF, began serving as president of the CCC's Conservative Citizens Foundation and as an adviser to the Informer.

Asked by the Intelligence Report about Lutton "” who works out of Tanton's Petoskey, Mich., offices "” and other anti-immigration activists who have climbed on board with hate groups, Tanton declined to answer that or a series of other questions faxed to him by the Report at his request.

The questions showed "little evidence of tolerance for differences of opinion," he wrote.

Last year, Virginia Abernethy, a professor emeritus at Vanderbilt's medical school and leader of the Tanton-influenced Population-Environment Balance, became the latest in the Tanton network to join the Citizens Informer editorial board.

"My view of the Council of Conservative Citizens," she told the Intelligence Report, "is that they support traditional values and the freedom of people to associate with people that they want to associate with."

She spoke on the same day that the CCC's website carried a comparison of black pop singer Michael Jackson and an ape "” a comparison that Abernethy suggested may have reflected "bad taste," but not racism.

"What is the point of a society that pushes [racial] mixing?" she asked when told of another CCC web item that derided the wife of murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl as a "mixed race" woman who is "committed to racial and ethnic amalgamation."

"Our society pushes mixing," the retired Vanderbilt professor added. "I think this is probably not a good thing for the society."

Opinion polls consistently show that a majority of Americans believe that immigration needs to be cut below current levels, although that does not imply that they support the ideas of white supremacists or other bigots.

Certainly, the lobbyists who visited in February were taken seriously by many of those they visited "” today, the web page of Tancredo's Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus carries links to the pages of a whole array of Tanton-associated groups.

The danger is not that immigration levels are debated by Americans, but that the debate is controlled by bigots and extremists whose views are anathema to the ideals on which this country was founded.

Intelligence Report
Summer 2002

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[COLOR:BLUE][B]When the creations of a genius collide with the mind of a layman, and produce an empty sound, there is little doubt as to which is at fault.